Hello everyone,

I'm making a calendar-dependent patch, where audio volume should depend on the date (it is intended to illustrate changes in biological cycles). For example, we want to know how these cycles "sounded" on, say, 01/01/01 - so we put in the date, and get the combination of volumes. Simple.
But. There seems to be no easy way to make PD understand dates - or maybe I'm in a block! What would you suggest? Has anyone tried something similar with dates, calendar etc?

Thanks,
Vadim

if you're after the current date, and are using OSX, then you can use the "shell" object to send commands to the Terminal, and receive information back... this includes date & time information. in fact, if you open up the help for "shell", there's an example of how to do exactly that.

or do you mean that Pd doesn't understand numbers divided by / symbols?

You can also just use [date] from zexy to get the current system date. If you mean for the user to type in a date like "01/01/01", you could have them type it into a [symbol\ object and separate the mm/dd/yy like this:

[symbol\
|
[symbol2list /]
|
[unpack f f f]

Thank you, aeo and Maelstorm!

And my apologies for long absence!

You're right, the [date] and [shell] would help me get the current system date, but that's not exactly what's needed.

The problem looks like this:
There's a unit of measure, a day.
There's a couple of cycles, say, a 5-day cycle, a 10-day cycle, a 27-day cycle.
All cycles start simultaneously and run continuously. Just like sine waves with different periods, creating different combinations every day. It is easy to get the state of the system, ie the amplitude of each wave, for any given day of its operation.
However, we do not think in terms of "how many days", we think dates. And our conventional Gregorian calendar doesn't have any simple mathematical formula behind it and is therefore difficult to express in pd. (isn't it?)

So we have a [bang< on, say, 01/01/99, the cycles start running, and we want to know the state of the system on, say, 01/01/01, ie on 732nd day of its operation. Now I had to calculate the number of days of operation in my head (and hopefully did it correctly). Can pd do this job for me? So all I need to do is input two dates, one indicating start, one - target date?

Sorry if my explanation is awkward, I hope that the task itself is quite comprehensible!

Best,
Vadim